We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not really an act, but a habit.

-Aristotle

Mrs. Dillon (my first piano teacher, Circa 1979) once told me:

When I didn't practice for a day, I could tell. When I didn't practice for 2 days, my manager could tell. But when I didn't practice for 3 days, my audience could tell.

Intermittent training, no matter how intensive, is utterly useless. You must practice every day for your entire life. That, and only that, is true training, or shugyo. You must train your body every day for decades; you must perpetually condition your body, or you will not really “get” what this is all about.

Every day I go through 24 training routines. In addition to that, for example, I swing the hakkakubo [a heavy eight-sided wooden baton used for sword practice] 300,000 times per year. I’ve been practicing for 30 or 40 years without skipping a single day.

- Yukiyoshi Sagawa

Gichin Funakoshi, photo from The Three Budo Masters

This completes the first Kata: Ippon Me Mae. This kata should be practices at least five hundred times before proceeding to the next kata. Keep in mind all the small movements it requires as you would keep in mind all the ingredients necessary to make a good stew.

Iai – The Art of Drawing the Sword
Darrell Craig

But is pure repetition really “the way?” Clearly, the many of the traditional martial arts have historically required massive repetitions in practice. But recent studies have begun to doubt the purity of the rule.

Practitioners, such as the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz once commented that:

I usually try to do one to two hours a day. It isn't good to practice too much, or your playing becomes too mechanical.

 

Professor Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, puts some specific boundaries around repetition, specifically on the need for a feedback loop to make repetition a tool for progress:

As a person develops a skill, the contents of what he or she repeats change. This seems obvious: in sports, repeating a tennis serve again and again, the player learns to aim the ball different ways; in music the child Mozart, aged six and seven, was fascinated by the Neapolitan-sixth chord progression, in fundamental position (the movement, say, from a C-major chord do an A-flat chord). A few years after working with it, he became adept in inverting the shift to other positions. When practice is organized as a means to a fixed end, then the problems of the closed system reappear; the person in training will meet a fixed target but won’t progress further.

A little esoteric, but meaningful. Pure repetition for the sake of repetition will not produce progress, or true excellence. Only mindful, purposeful repetition which includes actionable feedback (from a Sensei, the mirror in a dojo, a piano teacher) and introspection.

Which brings us to our Good Read of the month:

Good Reads

Dr. Christine Carter, Performance Psychologist and concert clarinetist has a more nuts & bolds approach to this when she attacks “block repetition” which I think pertains very well to jujutsu:

Muscle memory requires repetition and why wouldn’t we do all of the repetitions in a row? After all, if we are working on a difficult passage, it feels a lot more comfortable 10 minutes into practice than at the beginning. It is precisely this feeling of comfort and improvement that reinforces our reliance on blocked practice. The problem with this kind of practicing, however, is that the positive results we feel in the practice room today do not lead to the best long-term learning tomorrow. Practicing in a way that optimizes performance in the practice room does not optimize learning.

From the article “Why the Progress in the Practice Room Seems to Disappear Overnight”

In a random practice schedule, the performer must keep restarting different tasks. Because beginnings are always the hardest part, it will not feel as comfortable as practicing the same thing over and over again. But this challenge lies at the heart of why random practice schedules are more effective. When we come back to a task after an intervening task, our brain must reconstruct the action plan for what we are about to do. And it is at this moment of reconstruction that our brains are the most active.

With some thought, this begins to make sense. Changing directions (or partners) during jujutsu training is always refreshing. And at the Hakko Ryu Hombu Dojo, the general practice is to switch partners every 15-20 minutes.

In the Navy I met many great men. Probably the first one was an electronics instructor named “Mister Cooper.” This is what everyone from the students to the instructors to the commanding officer of the school called him.

He was an older man, friendly and affable. Technically, he was retired at the time, circa 1983. He said he knew electronics because had spent his last 10 years in the U.S. Army working in the Strategic Air Command repairing and maintaining the electronics of our nuclear arsenal. He said he had done this, when, after his first 20 years, “they kicked me out of the Infantry.” It sounded odd. Glued to the bottom of his nametag was his United States Army Combat Infantry Badge. He had been wearing that badge for 44 years.

One day on break, after imploring us to come to the lab out of hours to repeat the practice drills for troubleshooting the communications gear we were qualifying on, he told us a story:

Mister Cooper joined the army in late 1939, at the age of 17, when the Army had less than 200,000 men (6 years later, that number would go over 8,000,000). His first rifle was a Lee-Enfield MK1, a bolt-action WWI-era rifle. It was much older than he was. After boot camp, Private Cooper went out to a field and shot at targets, all day, every day, for 6 months, with his Lee-Enfield MK1. He thought this was very boring, so he volunteered for “Advance Infantry School” hoping for a change.

What he found when he got there was a lot more of the same: After receiving an updated rifle, he went with his company at dawn to a cold, soggy field, hit the ground, rolled over, and shot the target. All day. The next day, they went out at dawn, hit the ground, rolled over, and shot targets. All day, every day for a year, until the middle of 1941, at which time newly frocked Corporal Cooper began teaching other “Advanced Infantry” students to hit the ground, roll over, and shoot the target. He taught the newbies for another 6 months, all day, every day, until December 7th, 1941.

Four months later he was leading a squad of four troops through the jungles of New Guinea. On patrol, he and his squad moved through some brush, looked up and saw five Japanese faces looking back at him.

When he realized what he was doing, Corporal Cooper was on the ground, putting the second magazine into his rifle. There were five dead Japanese soldiers in front of him, and four dead American soldiers behind him. After securing the area and checking to see if anyone in his squad was still alive (they weren’t), he inventoried the weapons and ammunition and discovered that only two of his squad had even gotten a shot off. His first magazine was empty as was half of his second.
“Repetition and practice is the only reason I’m here with you all today.”

And that is The Onions of Repetition.

Edgewater, NJ.  Circa 1995.  Nidan promotion, Sensei Mike Wilson and Sensei Keith Wittenberg.  And "The gang."

This is also a reminder that in 2019, Sensei Mike Wilson will be getting another stripe.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. More are coming and your feedback will make them better.
Faithfully,
Sensei Scot Lynch
Yondan, Tsugiashi Do